The reworking of the classic femme fatale/nurturing
woman dichotomy evident in Touch of Evil and even in earlier films like 1948's Pitfall
indicates that, in the last decade of the film noir cycle, filmmakers consciously
altered noir conventions developed for the 1940s to reflect the American psyche of
the 1950s. As early as 1948, the "threat" of the independent female represented
by working women during World War II had been effectively contained by the post-War
marriage and baby boom. But this feminine threat was rapidly being replaced by a new,
equally threatening image of woman  the demanding housewife. Particularly during the
1950s, women often were viewed either as shameless gold-diggers out to capture wealthy
husbands or as selfish housewives relentlessly pressuring their husbands to play the
traditional role of breadwinner. 50 Indeed, as
Barbara Ehrenreich observes in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from
Commitment, which chronicles a male revolt against domesticity beginning in the 1950s,
men increasingly saw marriage and family life as a self-serving scheme devised by women:

The popular masculine wisdom of the fifties was that women had already won, not just
the ballot, but the budget and most of the gross national product. Homemaking was a
leisure activity reserved for the more powerful sex, while a proletariat of husbands
labored thanklessly to pay the bills. 51

In this context, it is not surprising that film noir  always suspicious of
women  reconfigured its conventions to question the latest perceived threat to
masculinity. In Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly, D.O.A., Pitfall,
and even The Big Heat, men and women are more alienated from one another than they
ever were in the classic period of film noir, and the basis for that alienation is
marriage and the family  or its possibility.

This skillful reshaping of noir conventions reminds us that film noir is
by definition a reshaping or rejection of Hollywood formulas and, by extension,
Hollywood's endorsement of the status quo family. And no convention is more
strongly associated with classical Hollywood cinema than the happy ending in which the
hero marries the woman he loves. Yet in film noir, no convention is more often
reworked or rejected. Although film noir typically offers the hero a chance to
marry the femme fatale, the good woman, or the marrying type, the hero (and the
film) consciously or unconsciously makes such a resolution impossible. Moreover, marriage
cannot serve as the resolution of a noir film or the goal of its characters without
disrupting the continuity of the film, particularly when the body of the film attacks or
questions the norms of conventional family life.

In rejecting the formula of Hollywood romance, film noir exposes the myths by
which we fulfill our desires  e.g., the happy ending in marriage  as well as
the myth of the family itself. That is, noir films question not only marriage and
the traditional family, but also the cultural supports (e.g., popular films) that
reinforce these institutions. Sylvia Harvey concludes that, by replacing the formula of
romance - the fulfillment of desire through marriage  with the frustration of desire
and the denial of marriage, film noir questions the validity of both the classical
Hollywood formula and the values that it endorses:

[R]omantic love and the institution of the family are logically and inevitably linked.
The logical conclusion to that romantic love which seeks always the passionate and
enduring love of a lifetime is the family, which must serve as the point of termination
and fulfillment of romance. And if successful romantic love leads inevitably in the
direction of the stable institution of marriage, the point about film noir, by contrast,
is that it is structured around the destruction or absence of romantic love and the
family. 52

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